Saturday, January 17, 2015

I've decided to complete my move to The Unz Review (http://www.unz.com/author/peter-frost/), so there will be no further blogging at this site. I'm doing this partly to reduce my workload of supervising two websites and partly to gain more control over my posts at TUR (commenting, correction of errors in the post, etc.). Thanks to Ron, my exposure on the Internet has greatly increased and my audience now includes a silent readership of mainstream journalists and, perhaps, newspaper editors.

Early last year, I had thoughts of closing up shop. I had the feeling of making the same points over and over again. I still have that feeling, but it no longer troubles me so much. For one thing, the same point can have many different applications in real life. For another, a lot of people have short memories, and it doesn't hurt to repeat a point I may have made two or three years ago.

Thank you for your loyalty! This isn't the end; it's just a move onward and upward.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

The
gruesome attack on Charlie Hebdo has
earned condemnation around the world. It has been called "cowardly"
and "evil" by Barack Obama, "a barbaric act" by Stephen
Harper, and an "infamy" by François Hollande.

Yes,
violence is serious. It's a crime when done by an individual and war when done
by a country. It's a grave breach of the rules that govern our society.
Whatever differences we may have, they are to be settled peacefully, through
the courts if need be. Violence is just not to be done.

Except
it increasingly is. The attack on Charlie
Hebdo is not an isolated incident. It's part of a worsening trend of violence
by people described as jeunes
[youths] or simply not described at all. That was not the case in the recent
attack; the victims were too well known. But it is generally the case, and this
conspiracy of silence has become something of a social norm, particularly in
the media.

Yet
statistics do exist, notably those compiled by the Gendarmerie. According to
French criminologist Xavier Raufer:

The
criminality we are talking about is the kind that is making life unbearable for
the population: burglaries, thefts of all sorts, assaults, violent thefts
without firearms, etc. In these specific cases, 7 out of 10 of these crimes are
committed by people who in one way or another have an immigrant background,
either directly (first generation on French territory, with or without a residence permit) or
indirectly (second generation). (Chevrier and Raufer, 2014)

The
word "immigrant" is misleading. Many if not most are French-born, and
they tend to come much more from some immigrant groups than from others. In
general, they are young men of North African or sub-Saharan African background,
plus smaller numbers of Roma and Albanians.

This
criminality, when not being denied, is usually put down to social
marginalization and lack of integration. Yet the reverse is closer to the
truth. The typical French person is an individual in a sea of individuals,
whereas immigrant communities enjoy strong social networks and a keen sense
of solidarity. This is one of the reasons given why the targets of the crime
wave are so often Français de souche
[old-stock French]. "Whites don't stick up for each other."

Personal violence
in human societies

In
France, as in other Western countries, personal violence is criminalized and
even pathologized. The young violent male is said to be "sick." Or
"deprived." He has not had a chance to get a good job and lead a nice
quiet life.

Yet
this is not how young violent males perceive themselves or, for that matter,
how most human societies have perceived them down through the ages. Indeed,
early societies accepted the legitimacy of personal violence. Each adult male
had the right to defend himself and his kin with whatever violence he deemed
necessary. The term "self-defence" is used loosely here—a man could
react violently to a lack of respect or to slurs on his honor or the honor of
his ancestors. There were courts to arbitrate this sort of dispute but they
typically had no power, enforcement of court rulings being left to the
aggrieved party and his male kin. In general, violence was a socially approved
way to prove one’s manhood, attract potential mates, and gain respect from
other men.

Things changed as human societies developed. The State grew in power and
increasingly monopolized the legitimate use of violence, thus knocking down the violent
young male from hero to zero. This course of action was zealously pursued in Northwest Europe
from the 11th century onward (Carbasse, 2011, pp. 36-56). There were two
reasons. First, the end of the Dark Ages brought a strengthening of State
power, a resumption of trade and, hence, a growing need and ability by the authorities to pacify
social relations. Second, the main obstacle to criminalization of personal
violence—kin-based morality and the desire to avenge wrongs committed against
kin—seems to have been weaker in Northwest Europe than elsewhere. There was
correspondingly a greater susceptibility to more universal and less kin-based forms of morality,
such as the Christian ban on murder in almost all circumstances.

Murder was increasingly punished not only by the ultimate penalty but also by exemplary
forms of execution, e.g., burning at the stake, drawing and quartering, and breaking on the wheel
(Carbasse, 2011, pp. 52-53). This "war on murder" reached a peak from
the 16th to 18th centuries when, out of every two hundred men, one or two would
end up being executed (Taccoen, 1982, p. 52). A comparable number of murderers
would die either at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial
(Ireland, 1987).

Gene-culture
co-evolution?

The
cultural norm thus shifted toward nonviolence. There was now strong selection
against people who could not or would not lead peaceful lives, their removal
from society being abrupt, via the hangman's noose, or more gradual, through
ostracism by one's peers and rejection on the marriage market. As a result, the
homicide rate fell from between 20 and 40 homicides per 100,000 in the late
Middle Ages to between 0.5 and 1 per 100,000 in the mid-20th century (Eisner,
2001, pp. 628-629).

Was
this decline due solely to legal and cultural restraints on personal violence?
Or were there also changes to the gene pool? Was there a process of
gene-culture co-evolution whereby Church and State created a culture of
nonviolence, which in turn favored some genotypes over others? We know that
aggressive/antisocial behavior is moderately to highly heritable. In the latest
twin study, heritability was 40% when the twins had different evaluators and
69% when they had the same one (Barker et al., 2009). The actual neural basis
is still unsure. Perhaps a predisposition to violence is due to stronger
impulsiveness and weaker internal controls on behavior (Niv et al., 2012).
Perhaps the threshold for expression of violence is lower. Perhaps ideation
comes easier (van der Dennen, 2006). Or perhaps the sight and smell of blood is
more pleasurable (vanden Bergh and Kelly, 1964).

It was probably a mix of cultural and genetic factors that caused the homicide rate to decline in Western societies. Even if culture alone were responsible,
we would still be facing the same problem. Different societies view male
violence differently:

In
Algerian society for example, children are raised according to their sex. A boy
usually receives an authoritarian and severe type of upbringing that will
prepare him to become aware of the responsibilities that await him in
adulthood, notably responsibility for his family and for the elderly. This is
why a mother will allow her son to fight in the street and will scarcely be
alarmed if the boy has a fall or if she sees a bruise. The boy of an Algerian
family is accustomed from an early age to being hit hard without whimpering too
much. People orient him more toward combat sports and group games in order to
arm him with courage and endurance—virtues deemed to be manly. (Assous, 2005)

In
Algeria and similar societies, a shaky equilibrium contains the worst
excesses of male violence. Men think twice before acting violently, for fear
of retaliation from the victim's brothers and other kinsmen. Of course, this
"balance of terror" does not deter violence against those who have
few kinsmen to count on.

Problems
really begin, however, when a culture that legitimizes male violence coexists
with one that delegitimizes it. This is France’s situation. Les jeunes perceive violence as a
legitimate way to advance personal interests, and they eagerly pursue this goal
with other young men. Conversely, les
Français de souche perceive such violence as illegitimate and will not
organize collectively for self-defence. The outcome is predictable. The first
group will focus their attacks on members of the second group—not out of hate
but because the latter are soft targets who cannot fight back or get support
from others.

But
what about the obviously Islamist motives of the Charlie Hebdo attackers? Such motives can certainly channel violent
tendencies, but those tendencies would exist regardless. Even if we completely
eradicated radical Islam, les jeunes
would still be present and still engaging in the same kind of behavior that is
becoming almost routine. At best, there would be fewer high-profile
attacks—the kind that make the police pull out all stops to find and kill the
perps. It is this "high end" that attracts the extremists, since they
are the least deterred by the risks incurred. The “low end” tends to attract
devotees of American hip hop. Keep in mind that less than two-thirds of
France's Afro/Arab/Roma population is even nominally Muslim.

Conclusion

Modern
France is founded on Western principles of equality, human betterment, and
universal morality. Anyone anywhere can become French. That view, the official one,
seems more and more disconnected from reality. Many people living in France
have no wish to become French in any meaningful sense. By "French" I
don't mean having a passport, paying taxes, or agreeing to a set of abstract
propositions. I mean behaving in certain concrete ways and sharing a common
culture and history.

This
reality is sinking in, and with it a loss of faith in the official view of
France. Faith can be restored, on the condition that outrageous incidents stop
happening. But they will continue to happen. And they will matter a lot more
than the much more numerous incidents tout court—the rising tide of thefts,
assaults, and home invasions that are spreading deeper and deeper into areas
that were safe a few years ago. The attack on Charlie Hebdo matters more because it cannot be hidden from public
view and public acknowledgment. How does one explain the disappearance of an
entire newspaper and the mass execution of its editorial board?

The
Front national will be the beneficiary, of course. It may already have one
third of the electorate, but that's still not enough to take power, especially
with all of the other parties from the right to the left combining to keep the
FN out. Meanwhile, the Great Replacement proceeds apace, regardless of whether
the government is "left-wing" or "right-wing."

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Migrants arriving on the island of Lampedusa (Wikicommons). The NATO-led invasion of
Libya has opened a huge breach in Europe's defences.

A
synthesis has been forming in the field of human biodiversity. It may be
summarized as follows:

1.
Human evolution did not end in the Pleistocene or even slow down. In fact, it
speeded up with the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, when the pace of
genetic change rose over a hundred-fold. Humans were no longer adapting to
relatively static natural environments but rather to faster-changing cultural
environments of their own making. Our ancestors thus directed their own
evolution. They created new ways of life, which in turn influenced who would
survive and who wouldn't.

2.
When life or death depends on your ability to follow a certain way of life, you
are necessarily being selected for certain heritable characteristics. Some of
these are dietary—an ability to digest milk or certain foods. Others, however,
are mental and behavioral, things like aptitudes, personality type, and
behavioral predispositions. This is because a way of life involves thinking and
behaving in specific ways. Keep in mind, too, that most mental and behavioral
traits have moderate to high heritability.

3.
This gene-culture co-evolution began when humans had already spread over the
whole world, from the equator to the arctic. So it followed trajectories that differed
from one geographic population to another. Even when these populations had to
adapt to similar ways of life, they may have done so differently, thus opening
up (or closing off) different possibilities for further gene-culture
co-evolution. Therefore, on theoretical grounds alone, human populations should
differ in the genetic adaptations they have acquired. The differences should
generally be small and statistical, being noticeable only when one compares
large numbers of individuals. Nonetheless, even small differences, when added
up over many individuals and many generations, can greatly influence the way a society
grows and develops.

4.
Humans have thus altered their environment via culture, and this man-made
environment has altered humans via natural selection. This is probably the
farthest we can go in formulating a unified theory of human biodiversity. For Gregory
Clark, the key factor was the rise of settled, pacified societies, where people
could get ahead through work and trade, rather than through violence and
plunder. For Henry Harpending and Greg Cochrane, it was the advent of
agriculture and, later, civilization. For J. Philippe Rushton and Ed Miller, it
was the entry of humans into cold northern environments, which increased
selection for more parental investment, slower life history, and higher
cognitive performance. Each of these authors has identified part of the big
picture, but the picture itself is too big to reduce to a single factor.

5.
Antiracist scholars have argued against the significance of human biodiversity,
but their arguments typically reflect a lack of evolutionary thinking. Yes,
human populations are open to gene flow and are thus not sharply defined (if
they were, they would be species). It
doesn't follow, however, that the only legitimate objects of study are sharply
defined ones. Few things in this world would pass that test.

Yes,
genes vary much more within human populations than between them, but these two
kinds of genetic variation are not comparable. A population boundary typically
coincides with a geographic or ecological barrier, such as a change from one
vegetation zone to another or, in humans, a change from one way of life to
another. It thus separates not only different populations but also differing pressures
of natural selection. This is why genetic variation within a population differs
qualitatively from genetic variation between populations. The first kind cannot
be ironed out by similar selection pressures and thus tends to involve genes of
little or no selective value. The second kind occurs across population
boundaries, which tend to separate different ecosystems, different vegetation
zones, different ways of life ... and different selection pressures. So the
genes matter a lot more.

This
isn't just theory. We see the same genetic overlap between many sibling species
that are nonetheless distinct anatomically and behaviorally. Because such
species have arisen over a relatively short span of time, like human
populations, they have been made different primarily by natural
selection, so the genetic differences between them are more likely to have
adaptive, functional consequences ... as opposed to "junk
variability" that slowly accumulates over time.

Why is the above
so controversial?

The
above synthesis should not be controversial. Yet it is. In fact, it scarcely
resembles acceptable thinking within academia and even less so within society
at large. There are two main reasons.

The war on racism

In
the debate over nature versus nurture, the weight of opinion shifted toward the
latter during the 20th century. This shift began during the mid-1910s and was
initially a reaction against the extreme claims being made for genetic
determinism. In reading the literature of the time, one is struck by the
restraint of early proponents of environmental determinism, especially when
they argue against race differences in mental makeup. An example appears in The Clash of Colour (1925), whose author
condemned America's Jim Crow laws and the hypocrisy of proclaiming the rights
of Europeans to self-determination while ignoring those of Africans and Asians.
Nonetheless, like the young Franz Boas, he was reluctant to deny the existence
of mental differences:

I
would submit the principle that, although differences of racial mental
qualities are relatively small, so small as to be indistinguishable with
certainty in individuals, they are yet of great importance for the life of
nations, because they exert throughout many generations a constant bias upon
the development of their culture and their institutions. (Mathews, 1925, p.
151)

That
was enlightened thinking in the 1920s. The early 1930s brought a radical turn
with Hitler's arrival to power and a growing sense of urgency that led many
Jewish and non-Jewish scholars to declare war on "racism." The word
itself was initially a synonym for Nazism, and even today Nazi Germany still
holds a central place in antiracist discourse.

Why
didn't the war on racism end when the Second World War ended? For one thing,
many people, feared a third global conflict in which anti-Semitism would play a
dominant role. For another, antiracism took on a life of its own during the
Cold War, when the two superpowers were vying for influence over the emerging
countries of Asia and Africa.

Globalism

The
end of the Cold War might have brought an end to the war on racism, or at least
a winding down, had it not replaced socialism with an even more radical
project: globalism. This is the hallmark of "late capitalism," a
stage of historical development when the elites no longer feel restrained by
national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves at their host
society's expense, mainly by outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and by
insourcing low-wage labor for jobs that cannot be relocated, such as those in
construction and services. That's globalism in a nutshell.

This
two-way movement redistributes wealth from owners of labor to owners of
capital. Businesses get not only a cheaper workforce but also weaker labor and
environmental standards. To stay competitive, workers in high-wage countries
have to accept lower pay and a return to working conditions of another age. The
top 10% are thus pulling farther and farther ahead of everyone else throughout
the developed world. They're getting richer ... not by making a better product
but by making the same product with cheaper and less troublesome inputs of
labor. This is not a win-win situation, and the potential for revolutionary
unrest is high.

To
stave off unrest, economic systems require legitimacy, and legitimacy is made
possible by ideology: a vision of a better future; how we can get there from
here; and why we're not getting there despite the best efforts. Economic
systems don't create ideology, but they do create conditions that favor some
ideologies over others. With the collapse of the old left in the late 1980s,
and the rise of market globalization, antiracism found a new purpose ... as a
source of legitimacy for the globalist project.

I
saw this up close in an antiracist organization during the mid to late 1980s.
Truth be told, we mostly did things like marching in the May Day parade,
agitating for a higher minimum wage, denouncing the U.S. intervention in
Panama, organizing talks about Salvador Allende and what went wrong in Chile
... you get the drift. Antiracism was subservient to the political left. This
was not a natural state of affairs, since the antiracist movement—like the Left
in general—is a coalition of ethnic/religious factions that prefer to pursue
their own narrow interests. This weakness was known to the political right,
many of whom tried to exploit it by supporting Muslim fundamentalists in
Afghanistan and elsewhere and black nationalists in Africa, Haiti, and the U.S.
Yes, politics makes strange bedfellows.

With
the onset of the 1990s, no one seemed to believe in socialism anymore and we
wanted to tap into corporate sources of funding. So we reoriented. Leftist
rhetoric was out and slick marketing in. Our educational materials looked
glossier but now featured crude "Archie Bunker" caricatures of
working people, and the language seemed increasingly anti-white. I remember
feeling upset, even angry. So I left.

Looking
back, I realize things had to happen that way. With the disintegration of the
old socialist left, antiracists were freer to follow their natural
inclinations, first by replacing class politics with identity politics, and
second by making common cause with the political right, especially for the
project of creating a globalized economy. Antiracism became a means to a new
end.

This
is the context that now frames the war on racism. For people in a position to
influence public policy, antiracism is not only a moral imperative but also an
economic one. It makes the difference between a sluggish return on investment
of only 2 to 3% (which is typical in a mature economy) and a much higher one.

What to do?

Normally,
I would advise caution. People need time to change their minds, especially on a
topic as emotional as this one. When tempers flare, it's usually better to let
the matter drop and return later. That's not cowardice; it's just a recognition
of human limitations. Also, the other side may prove to be right. So, in a
normal world, debate should run its course, and the policy implications
discussed only when almost everyone has been convinced one way or the other.

Unfortunately,
our world is far from normal. A lot of money is being spent to push a phony
political consensus against any controls on immigration. This isn't being done
in the dark by a few conspirators. It's being done in the full light of day by
all kinds of people: agribusiness, Tyson Foods, Mark Zuckerberg, the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, and small-time operations ranging from landscapers to
fast-food joints. They all want cheaper labor because they're competing against
others who likewise want cheaper labor. It's that simple ... and stupid.

This
phony consensus is also being pushed at a time when the demographic cauldron of
the Third World is boiling over. This is particularly so in sub-Saharan Africa,
where the decline in fertility has stalled and actually reversed in some
countries. The resulting population overflow is now following the path of least
resistance—northward, especially with the chaos due to the NATO-led invasion of
Libya. In the current context, immigration controls should be strengthened, and
yet there is lobbying to make them even weaker. The idiocy is beyond belief.

For
these reasons, we cannot wait until even the most hardboiled skeptics are
convinced. We must act now to bring anti-globalist parties to power: the UKIP
in Britain, the Front national in France, the Partij voor de Vrijheid in the
Netherlands, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and the
Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden. How, you may ask? It's not too complicated. Just
go into the voting booth and vote. You don't even have to talk about your dirty
deed afterwards.

It
looks like such parties will emerge in Canada and the United States only when
people have seen what can be done in Europe. Until then, the tail must wag the
dog. We in North America can nonetheless prepare the way by learning to speak
up and stand up, and by recognizing that the "Right" is just as
problematic as the "Left."

References

Clark,
G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief
Economic History of the World, Princeton University Press, Princeton and
Oxford.

Clark,
G. (2009a). The indicted and the wealthy:
surnames, reproductive success, genetic selection and social class in
pre-industrial England,

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Welcome to my blog! For the most part, this page will be an extension of my website, with comments relating to my research. But it will also branch out into more general discussions of human evolution.